The Attachment Read online

  Hope ‘your’ Peter is travelling well.

  Happy days, and buckets of Bali love.

  Tony

  PS Keep thinking of other topics—such as the loss of actual letters and handwriting. Another time.

  DEAR READER ,

  When we looked back on our letters, Ailsa was shocked at how often we had returned to the issue of death and dying. For me, I suppose, there was less surprise, because death is a professional constant of my working week. Nonetheless when I read that account of taking Peter to Tambourine Bay, I was thrown back to the days around his death. Peter let go of his life four months after that email.

  He died in hospital after weeks of a difficult and crucial struggle, early one soft April morning. He was alone.

  Late the night before, his wife Margaret and I had broken our long bedside vigil and returned home to snatch some sleep. Called back to the hospital near dawn, the family sat around his bed in loving silence, remembering stories of his life in floods of tears mixed with nose-running laughter, and praying familiar words from our childhood. Finally I anointed his dead body, the man with whom I had been bonded at the hip for eight decades.

  Brothers have many languages, some of which are physical like bruises and broken fingers, and punching each other when you want to say I love you but don’t know how to say it right; some of them are the gentle and not-so-gentle put-downs the Irish call ‘slagging’; some of them involve competing in sporting contests—for us it was golf—as though lives depended upon the outcome. Many languages—even at times, those that employ words.

  On that morning, as his younger brother, I anointed him with the ancient sacrament of farewell and with my tears. As I’ve already mentioned in an email, the Catholic ritual directs the celebrant to trace a small cross in oil on the head, the heart, the ears, the eyes, each hand and foot—reverencing the dead body. This ancient language of human touch becomes a dramatic acknowledgement of the sacred and heroic journey of each person. Words of farewell are to be spoken gently.

  Peter died of dementia. Such patients die slowly, life leaking away like water from a cracked kettle. His last weeks were spent in hospital. His language was confused and his thoughts rambled along ever-wilder paths. Any attempt at even the simplest conversation was too hard. We smiled a lot. Sometimes he smiled back. Toughest of all was when his frustration and anger became so intense that the medical staff had to attach restraints to hold him in bed for his own safety. We were left emotionally shredded.

  To deal with my grief, I developed the habit of massaging his feet and his restless legs with soothing oil. For me, and I confidently believe for Peter himself, it was a moment of intense connection and love. Funny thing—I suppose like many men of our age, we rarely expressed our affection for one another in any physical manner. None of this hugging business. Wrestling perhaps, in the backyard; being ‘doubled’ on the back of our ancient bicycle; or packing down in a rugby scrum, were all acceptable behaviours, even the stuff of heroes. Hugging, no way! And yet here we were experiencing the deep, primitive magic of touch. ‘Touch comes before sight, before speech,’ observes Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. ‘It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.’ I didn’t fully realise at the time that I was rehearsing what was to become a deeper reality in the sacrament of his last anointing.

  Grief is the price we pay for love. If you don’t want to grieve, don’t love. My parents’ deaths were separated by 25 years. To have been with each of them at the moment they died I regard as a special grace. It is scarcely necessary to spell out, but there is something heartrending about anointing your parents and then praying for them over their graves.

  Dealing with ongoing grief is another thing—at least that has been my experience. For my mother I keep telling stories about her colourful life—to anyone or any group who will listen. Twenty years on I tell and retell them, again and again. Her wonderfully acerbic sense of humour, her love of horse racing and politics, her unfashionable yet strong paintings (a skill she only discovered in her old age), her Irish love of whisky and milk.

  ‘What whisky and milk can’t cure,’ she would say, ‘can’t be cured.’

  For my father, when I recovered from the first wound of letting him go, I went off on a determined search to find the story of his father and his father’s father. Finally I uncovered a fabulous tale of love and survival.

  To lose a brother, however, is quite different. It is to have a limb amputated. The sweet memories of our childhood adventures choked me. Four years on, I still miss him keenly. There may come a future time, perhaps, when telling his stories will help to lubricate my grief. Not yet.

  In the Catholic funeral service—the Requiem Mass—there is a phrase that never fails to have me catch my breath, that sits in the midst of prayers which are sometimes more florid yet contain less impact:

  ‘Life is changed, not ended.’

  A phrase stark in its simplicity; words which capture generations of Christian belief, quite devoid of the sometimes frantic claims of believers about the mystery of death.

  On this day I was celebrating my own brother’s farewell. Questions were never far below the surface of my mind, as this moment of letting go gripped me in a vice. Are we no more than accidental creatures in an accidental universe? Are our prayers simply a childish search for security or are they a genuine search for truth? In the face of death, are our prayers merely the noise of deluded and frightened people? Is the sacred story of my brother’s life simply a journey ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’?

  Sometimes Christian believers appear to be free of confusion about death. That is not my personal experience. Faith should never be confused with certainty. Belief and knowledge are two quite different ways of seeing. I do not know what happens when a human being dies. I do not know where this gift of human consciousness in a newborn baby comes from. In short, I don’t know where we came from, nor do I know where we go when we die.

  But amidst the sound and the fury of our life, all the tragedy and at times senselessness of it, for some of us there exists a gentle whisper of belief, a rumour of angels, a treasured story passed down by those who love us.

  We believe that we come from the hands of a gentle and loving mystery we call our God. We believe that finally we return to those tender hands, which gave us the gift of life in the first place, into the most merciful of all embraces.

  Life is changed, not ended.

  One of the tragic but inevitable facts of life, is that we die with more beauty in us than we have ever been able to express; with more imagination than people have ever been able to see; with more dreams than our family and friends have ever heard; with a more beautiful song in us than we have ever been able to sing. We are all unfinished symphonies.

  Peter is one of those unfinished symphonies.

  His music, my faith assures me, will, in some entirely mysterious manner, continue to enrich my life and all those who love him.

  Tony

  Tony!

  Big news!

  As of the 13th of December, Peter and I will be in Ubud, where we plan to spend Christmas. I will have WiFi, but am NOT taking my computer. So my request to you, oh best of pen-pals, is that you might continue to jot me some lines, despite the fact that I may not be able to answer as fully as usual. Call me pushy, but please say yes.

  Now. Back to your missive from over a broken gate . . .

  Thanks for your generosity about what I wrote. ‘Emotional intelligence’ is an oft-used term in the theatre, too. Like you I’m never sure what it is or who has it, but I think that if I’m going to claim any kind of intelligence, that might be the one I’d want. It’s more practical than any other, I’ll wager. And practical—useful—is the thing I’d most like to be.

  The seminary training . . .

  All the things you mention—celibacy, isolation, separation from the opposite sex—seem to me to be recipes for hard outcomes, to be honest. Interestingly, though, there are si
milarities between life in the theatre and religious life, despite the fact that those edges don’t exist in showbiz.

  I think the strongest in both worlds respond to some kind of calling, even if they resist it being categorised that way, but I’m sure that fragile people can be damaged by entering theatre or seminary. Much of it has to do with the way in which creativity calls to be expressed in all of us. When that is stopped up or denied, it’s no surprise to me that despair or depression follow. We see those, along with alcoholism and substance abuse, among the clergy, but they also occur in the theatre, in no small part because of the long periods of enforced unemployment. Being unable to express creatively can be a kind of death.

  I realise that some traditions hold that creativity and celibacy are linked, but I’m of the mind that creativity and sexual expression rise from the same centre in the body—and from what I’ve observed, if the possibility for creation is denied, that will lead to hard outcomes.

  You write of true and false selves, and I take your point, though having investigated all manner of characters in my work, I’m not so sure that such things exist.

  Actors work to inhabit other selves, many of them seemingly a world away. In the process, what most good actors do is uncover aspects of themselves that might help to reveal the puzzle of the character’s journey. Inevitably, actors come to empathise with the person they’re playing. They don’t become them, but they do get to see the world through other eyes.

  This strikes me as an important lesson for life. We are all capable of having a sociopath self or a saintly self, depending on the way ‘given circumstances’ hit us. Personally, I don’t think that ‘the self’ is static—that there can be a true and false version of it. Rather, I think the self is constantly evolving, and I’m not sure how much we can ever know it—know our self. But the search for self—the examination and consideration and discovery of our whys and wherefores—is the only way through this turbulent life on our messy planet. Ha! We’re back to Holloway and his monster and saint in a mutilated world! Or perhaps to the old gem about the unexamined life being not worth living.

  The aside to all that is—no, I don’t think people have to be self-realised in order to be great actors. Rather, they have to be permeable. Thin-skinned. Open. Wide open. They have to be prepared to let the ‘stuff’ of life in and out without much protection. Consider many of the greatest actors—people I would almost call shamans in that their gifts were so luminous. Some were alcoholics and depressives, violent at times, or mean. No naming names, but you don’t have to look far to find them. Genius—or the great actor’s gift of revelation—has a cost. Interestingly, though, many of my favourites are, anecdotally at least, sane and balanced in their personal lives, able to manage fame, and the need to morph, with grace and sanity.

  As to women having more fun in life, Antonio—well believe it or not, I don’t have an opinion on that, but I know I have more than my allotted share!

  I’m so very sorry to hear about your brother. Dementia is vicious, and it trades on fear and guilt. We went through it a little with Peter’s mum, and so I know something of the journey. I can well imagine it will create pain for your family, and I have nothing useful to offer you save for my sympathy. Are you trying to fix, Tony? Is it fixable? Or is it just that you want to love as much as possible for as long as possible? They may be different impulses. Not preaching to the preacher—that would be impudent and too silly. Just asking. Wondering. Hoping you are not setting yourself up for heartbreak. Families are the ultimate teachers, are they not? That fierce, uncontestable love that proclaims itself—first, last, blood, history . . . swimming rings . . .

  ‘Christmas looming.’

  I’m glad I will be in a place where offerings are made daily at doorways and by riverbanks and on hillsides. Where the idea of divine is built with flowers and little biscuits and palm fronds and incense. Where terimah kasih—receive love—is on every set of lips, and the smiles never stop.

  I don’t speak Bahasa, sadly. How I wish. But I’d wager there is nowhere on earth where the smile is spoken so clearly, and the language of the heart so readily adopted. And there are few places I’ve been where ‘God language’ is as unnecessary, because God is lived in the daily activities with such effortless grace. It’s a place where I can truly give thanks.

  I wish you were here to come for a walk with me. The thing about walking in company is that it teaches compromise. To find the rhythm of another. To adjust. To share silence and talk. To listen. And I slow down then. I can do slow, you know. Maybe it’s not as much fun as whistling for Tara Morice, but more fun than whistling Dixie!

  Tomorrow I will do a food shop at my favourite Italian supermarket, because I’m cooking for ten on Saturday night. They are predicting THIRTY-SEVEN degrees on Saturday and so I must prep as much as I can.

  I think it a very good thing you didn’t become an actor. Show-offs are not what we need in our biz.

  Much, much, so much to discuss. And I must stop.

  Gracias, Tony. I will carry you as I walk. Your brother’s illness, along with all else for which you feel ‘responsible’, must make the days heavy sometimes.

  Swim strong, compañero.

  A x

  Ailsa,

  Just back from a funeral, and lacking energy to respond as I’d wish. But a story rose to the surface, when you admitted—to my relief—that you didn’t speak Bahasa as well as those other lingos. Always thought it a chancy business trying to remember bits and pieces of a language not our own. I heard of a man once who claimed he could say in Swahili, ‘I have two oranges.’ Always seemed a slender base for further conversation.

  I buried a friend a few months ago, an inveterate traveller who maintained it was vital to know one phrase in as many languages as possible, especially for use in high-priced restaurants. The phrase?

  ‘My friend will pay.’

  I pass it on to you. The only wisdom I can summon just now.

  Must put my head down. Will write when I can do justice to your thoughts.

  T

  Antonio.

  I’m wasted—but not in the way that you are. I don’t know how you manage all those funerals. To call it ‘part of the job’ as you do is deliberately underplaying it, I know. It must cost.

  Anyway, my exhaustion rises from a conversation that left me raging. This time with a Professional Devout Catholic. She claims the abuse stories are over-dramatised. I can’t cop that party line. Too defensive by half. I won’t go any further, save to say that I feel I want to curl in a ball like a wounded dog and lick wounds. How do you do it, friend?

  Hope I didn’t offend or give hurt by questioning you about your brother. Been thinking about it on and off all night. What would I know? Would I have included those questions if I had written by hand? Not sure.

  My brothers, Brett and Justin, are touchstones for me in very different ways, and to entertain the thought of losing them, even for a moment, is to cause instant pain. I’m so sorry for any stress caused by impudence or thoughtlessness. Hope the water was soothing this morn. Please tell me if I gave hurt. I mean it.

  Oh dear. Neurotic blonde.

  Write blog. Prune roses. Clean bathroom. Chop wood. Carry water.

  Send love.

  Sign off.

  A x

  PS I love your friend’s advice about learning ‘My friend will pay’. What a guy. Brilliant. I have consulted Google Translate, and they have given me the Indonesian version. Hopefully it will get me across the line—Teman saya akan membayar. Thanks!

  Hope you are resting well.

  Good God woman. Hurt me?!!

  You mean about giving me your loving sage advice about Peter?

  You can’t be serious.

  It was received as you sent it—with affection, good sense and all the marks of a genuine intriguing compañera. I’m left with a deep sense that our friendship grows and matures with every conversation. One of these days I’ll give you cause to really beat me up (
I’d better put some sort of smiley badge on that statement, like they do—but can’t find one). And I trust that such an event will only help us break through to yet another level of this pilgrimage.

  Professional Devout Catholic.

  Yes, of course they exist, but I’m put in mind of the words of Dan Berrigan, the fabled Jesuit activist. He used to say to those who enquired why he remained a priest when everyone else had left, that ‘many of the worst people on planet earth that I know are Catholic. But it just happens that some of the best people I know, share this same tradition. They give me strength.’ (Rough translation by me)

  That insight gives me strength.

  The gospel story of the wheat and the weeds comes to mind.

  This, of course, is not an answer to the many issues you raised in your last mail. I have to find some more creative space to do it justice. Just had a long meeting with the parish finance committee and my brain is fried. Also, as the old bumper sticker says—Procrastinate NOW!

  Night night.

  Tony

  PS Thanks for your sensitivity to this spiky echidna. I like to think of myself as pretty rugged and invulnerable actually. However, today I spent a couple of hours with Peter. He’s not travelling too well, and your words make great sense.

  Good morning, rugged invulnerable one. I’m so sorry to hear about Peter. It’s very tough when we can’t make things better.

  Selfishly, relief flooded in and a little something lifted. I had not wanted to be impertinent. Thank you. Really. Phew.

  But don’t kid yourself. The echidna’s only defence is to tuck its head under, roll into a ball, and hope the predator can’t be bothered. Rugged? Not!

  You know, it’s a toss-up as to whether I love them or the snail more. I think the echidna’s gait is entirely captivating—that rolling, comic walk, snuffling along. And the self-absorption. And the lack of awareness of anything but the thing they must do and be.

  The snail, of course, is my favourite, and probably my necessary totem.